Upgrading my linux boot, suggestions?

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Hey, currently I have a Fedora 11 KDE4 setup as my dual boot (primary boot is 7). I'm currently considering ether kubuntu 9.10, opensuse 11.2, or Fedora 12. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding which one to go with. Part of me wants to go for Kubuntu, however I have heard bad things about Kubuntu compared to other KDE distros. Another part of me wants to go to SUSE again, and another part of me wants to just get the new fedora. Anyone got any suggestions on this, I want to keep the KDE4 GUI, so Gnome is out.

Personally I would go with ubuntu, never cared for KDE, but thats just my personal
choice, I am sure your kubuntu choice should be fine and trouble free.

I don't know at this point, I don't really mind compiling stuff, however the locks out of root kind of cause my head to spin (why lock us out?). I know you can bypass the Root lockout on the 'buntu variants, however I just am hesitant about the fact that they don't want us logging in as admin, when I have a ton of stuff to do that usually REQUIRES root login.

As far as compiling though, I dont mind it, primarily because I use my computer for software development, so I'll just do a
./configure
make
make install
and be done with it. I get up, and by the time I'm back, it should be done. The main thing though is I just don't want something where I have to compile every single darn thing. The other big thing is just I want one which works well with Wine, as I found that with F11, Wine tended to not detect my sound chip. My overall goal, is something which I can start to migrate over from windows, I know I won't be able to convert everything over, but I want to get as far away from MS territory as possible, but with gaming the way it is, that isn't going to happen soon.

I prefer to compile as little as possible, but I have no hang-ups about downloading an SVN or GIT trunk, and just compiling the thing from source. In the end I'm not really sure about the actual advantages the 'buntu versions have over stuff like SUSE and Fedora.

Kubuntu 9.10 is nice. I'm usually more of a GNOME guy, but KDE4.3 is pretty good, and Kubuntu is doing it just as well as OpenSUSE and Fedora, if not better. Certainly it's a better choice than OpenSUSE (absolute garbage in my experience).

I'm not sure what you mean by root lockout. You certainly shouldn't just log into the GUI as root, that's just poor practice. *buntu allows you to use "sudo" to temporarily gain root privileges, or you can use "sudo su" (in my bash.rc I've actually aliased "su" to this to make it more like other distros) to become root in a terminal session.

For me its just easier to log in as root when I'm compiling stuff, that way I don't have to do that many extra commands to get libraries in the main usr folder.

Still generally a bad idea. Anyways, you can log in as root in Ubuntu if you really want to, it's not that hard to get around. Or you could just open a root terminal and work from there. If you feel comfortable in Linux in general, you could give Debian a try. It's similar to Ubuntu, but rock solid stable and less likely to try and hold your hand if you don't want it to. Also, the testing branch of Debian is rolling-release, so you never have to upgrade the whole distro.

Edit: Also, I think Debian's KDE is somewhat better than Kubuntu's. Take that with a grain of salt, though- I'm a gtk fanboy at heart.

you just need to give root a password to enable it, run:
sudo -i
sudo passwd root